Getting to know meditation (Part One)

For almost six and a half years I’ve been meditating without missing one single day. I had begun in 1969, dropping off and restarting for short periods every now and then. With that in mind, don’t jump to the conclusion that meditation is addictive, because it’s generally not considered pathological, though some people become attached to the pleasant mental states it can produce. 

It’s simply hard to stick to it for a wide variety of reasons. Yes, there are hundreds of millions of people who meditate worldwide and the practice is gaining rapidly more followers, especially in the mindfulness category. Unlike myself, most people can’t maintain a strict daily practice for long periods of time as dropout rates are substantial, especially during the first few months after they get started. 

Meditating begins anywhere from childhood (in traditional cultures) to middle age (in secular settings like our Western world). Reliable country-by-country statistics exist only for some nations; the highest participation appears in countries where meditation is integrated into religious and cultural life (see table). 

The biggest uncertainty lies in Asia, where meditation is often embedded within religious life and may not be measured separately from prayer, temple attendance, yoga, or other spiritual practices. For countries such as India, Thailand, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, China, and Japan, the cultural importance of meditation is clear, but rigorous nationally representative prevalence figures are surprisingly scarce. 

One interesting conclusion from the available data is that modern secular countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States now report meditation participation rates comparable to—or sometimes higher than—those measured in many traditionally Buddhist countries, depending on how "meditation" is defined, which is a dimension we’ll explore in the next blog.